ANIMALS
THE FISH (MATSYA)
The myth of the fish and the flood is not originally associated with Vishnu; as we have seen, at first the fish was just a fish. But in the Mahabharata (3.185), the fish tells Manu that he is Brahma, Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, and since the fish expands from a minnow to a kind of whale, and since he is a savior, the Puranas make him one of the avatars of the god Vishnu, who is both an expander (as the dwarf who becomes a giant) and a savior (as Krishna often claims to be).
THE BOAR (VARAHA)
Like the avatar of the fish, the boar avatar was not originally associated with Vishnu; in the Brahmanas, the boar, an amphibious animal, is Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, who spreads earth out on the waters to make her into a disk and who marries her.8 The Vishnu Purana identifies Prajapati with Narayana (a name of Vishnu).9 At Udayagiri, in Malwa, a shrine carved out of the rock-face and dated to the opening of the fifth century CE depicts Vishnu’s incarnation as the boar, rescuing the earth depicted as a female boar. This may have been a political allegory of Chandra Gupta II’s conquest of Malwa,10 making the image simultaneously Vishnu married to the earth-boar and a king married to the earth goddess.
THE TORTOISE (KURMA)
The tortoise appears in the Mahabharata when the gods and antigods decide to churn the ocean of milk to obtain the elixir of immortality, the soma, using Mount Mandara as the churn. All that is said there is: “The gods and antigods said to the king of tortoises, the supreme tortoise, ‘You are the one suited to be the resting place for the mountain.’ The tortoise agreed, and Indra placed the tip of the mountain on his back, fastening it tightly (1.15-17).” Vishnu is not the tortoise here; indeed he appears in this version of the story in a different form, as the nymph Mohini, who bewitches and seduces the antigods so that they lose their opportunity to drink the soma. But the tortoise goes on to be quite famous in Hindu cosmologies and in images of the myth of the churning, and the Puranas identify the tortoise as an avatar of Vishnu. Usually he is depicted as anthropomorphic from the waist up, tortoise from the waist down, but sometimes simply as a tortoise tout court.
WOMEN
KRISHNA (AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVED HIM)
Major changes were beginning to be made in the worship of Krishna at this time. When we meet Krishna in the Mahabharata, he is already an adult; the Harivamsha, the appendix to the Mahabharata, composed a century or two after it (c. 450 CE), gives him a childhood. This childhood may have been derived, in the early centuries CE, from popular, vernacular, non-Brahminical stories about a village boy who lived among the cowherd people,11 a far cry from the powerful prince Krishna of the Mahabharata. In a stroke of genius, the Harivamsha put the two mythologies together, the Mahabharata story of the prince and the folk/vernacular stories of a cowherd child, by bridging them with a third story, a variant of the story that Freud called the family romance,12 the myth of a boy of noble blood who is raised by animals, or by the herders of animals, until he grows up and finds his real parents.ip The family romance is a ready-made, off-the-rack story right at hand to be picked up and used when there is a sudden need to plug a gaping hole, to construct a childhood for a god who has appeared only as an adult in earlier texts. Once the join was made, the Harivamsha quickly absorbed the cowherd mythology and developed it in its own ways. Krishna in the Mahabharata was already a double figure, a god pretending to be a prince, but now he was doubly doubled: a god pretending to be a prince pretending to be a cowherd. This opened up the way to the worship of the child Krishna and a theology of the hidden god, revealed through a series of charming miracles that puzzle all but the reader who is in the know.
The Harivamsha tells the story of Krishna’s birth into his double life:
THE BIRTH OF KRISHNA
The wicked king Kamsa heard a prophecy that the eighth child born of his cousin Devaki and her husband, Vasudeva, would kill Kamsa. He let Devaki live, on condition that Vasudeva would deliver to Kamsa every child she bore, and Kamsa killed seven infants in this way.iq Vishnu placed himself in the eighth embryo, and, at his request, the goddess of sleep took the form of the goddess Kali and entered the womb of Yashoda, the wife of the cowherd Nanda. One night Krishna was born to the princess Devaki and the goddess Kali was born to the cowherd woman Yashoda. Vasudeva carried the infant Krishna to Yashoda and brought the infant girl to Devaki. When Kamsa saw the girl, he dashed her violently to the stone floor. She went to heaven and became an eternal goddess, Kali, to whom sacrifices of animals are made, for she is fond of flesh. And Krishna grew up in the village of cowherds. When he was grown, he killed Kamsa.13
Krishna’s birth is doubled in yet another way, by the simultaneous birth of Sleep as Kali and the daughter of Devaki as the daughter of Yashoda. The worship of the goddess Kali, a new, specifically Hindu element injected into the basic formula, signals the beginning of a new prominence of women in the worship of Krishna, starting in this text, where Devaki, in a manner reminiscent of Draupadi, harasses her husband, Vasudeva, and forces him to stop saying, “It is all fated,” and to do something to save her baby. Indeed bhakti texts generally challenge the more fatalistic construction of karma, believing that people’s actions in their current lives can produce good or bad fortune in this life and that devotion to the gods, in particular, pays off in this lifetime14 as well as in the next.
YASHODA AND THE GOPIS
The Harivamsha makes Krishna’s foster mother, Yashoda, a major character, as does the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana, which bears the imprint of the bhakti wind blowing from the south and develops in glorious detail the other mothers of Krishna, the Gopis or cowherd women, who become his foster mothers and cluster around him in adoration. There are also negative foster mothers: The infant Krishna kills (among many ogres and ogresses) the ogress Putana, who tries to poison him with the milk from her breasts but is killed instead when he sucks out her life’s breath with her milk .15
The Bhagavata also domesticates the myth of looking into the mouth of god (Krishna), which, in the Gita, reveals to Arjuna the unbearable image of doomsday. In the Purana, Yashoda looks into the mouth of her toddler Krishna and sees in it the universe and herself (as Brahma sees the universe and himself in Vishnu), a vision that she finds unbearable, just as Arjuna did. In both cases, Krishna grants, in his infinite love, the boon that Arjuna and Yashoda will forget the vision.16
GOPIS AS LOVERS
When passion, even religious passion, is the game, the erotic is always a heavy hitter. Krishna in the Mahabharata is a prince with many wives, sixteen thousand by some counts, though he had his favorites.ir The Puranas depict Krishna as a handsome young man who dances with the many Gopis, the wives of the cowherd men. In the great circle dance in the moonlight (rasa-lila), he doubles himself again and again so that each Gopi thinks that Krishna is with her. Similarly, the Gopis double themselves, leaving shadow images of themselves in bed with their unsuspecting husbands. The Gopis are both his mothers and his lovers; the Puranas tend to blur the distinction between the love of Krishna’s mothers (“calf love” [vatsalya]) and the love of his lovers (“honey-sweet love” [madhurya ]).17 Here is yet another example of the astounding Hindu ability to combine ideas that other religions might feel constrained to choose between or at least to keep separate.
RADHA
In later Puranas, one Gopi in particular is the lover of Krishna: Radha, who is virtually unknown to the Sanskrit mythology of Krishna until the seventh century and does not become important to the devotional community until the sixteenth century,18 when bhakti has feminized sectarianism and made women more important. The story of Krishna and Radha inspired the Sanskrit Gita Govinda, “The Song of [Krishna] the Cowherd,” by Jayadeva, the court poet of the Bengali King Laksmanasena (c. 1179-1209), an important text for Vaishnava worshipers. Jayadeva’s Radha is powerful; Krishna bends down before her and puts her feet on his head. The romance of the two adulterous lovers may owe something to the Persian romances that were becoming known in
India through the Muslim presence at this time, in some Sufi sects.19
In the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna would disappear from the circle dance from time to time, and the Gopis searched for him in an exquisite agony of longing, the great Indian theme of love and separation (viraha), here in the familiar bhakti mode of longing for the absent god (the deus absconditus or otiosus ). But in the later Puranas, often under Tantric influences, it was Radha alone with whom the worshiper, male or female, identified. As a Gopi, Radha was also one of Krishna’s foster mothers, a role that she does not entirely abandon when she becomes his lover. In the Brahmavaivarta Purana, probably composed in Bengal in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the mature Radha is put in charge of the infant Krishna, to her intense annoyance; suddenly he turns into a gorgeous young man, with whom she makes love joyously for many days—until he turns back again into a demanding, and wet, infant.20
RAMA (AND SITA)
Images from the life of Rama are represented at the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, though in general there is little evidence of Rama worship in temples at that time (the Gupta period), nor, in dramatic contrast with Krishna, is Rama’s story elaborated upon to any significant degree in the early Puranas. But Valmiki’s Ramayana was not only still widely read in Sanskrit at the time of the later Puranas (800-1500 CE) but was now beginning to be translated into the vernacular literatures, as well as retold in other Sanskrit texts. The Mahabharata, Harivamsha, Vishnu Purana, and several other Puranas omit the fire ordeal of Sita entirely,21 but the fifteenth-century Adhyatma-Ramayana used it to exculpate Sita not only from being present in Ravana’s home but from the weakness of asking Rama to capture the golden deer for her. This illusory deer, however, may have inspired the Adhyatma-Ramayana to create the illusory Sita who now desires the deer:
THE ILLUSORY DEER OF THE ILLUSORY SITA
Rama, knowing what Ravana intended to do, told Sita, “Ravana will come to you disguised as an ascetic; put a shadow [chaya] of yourself outside the hut, and go inside the hut yourself. Live inside fire, invisible; when I have killed Ravana, come back to me as you were before.” Sita obeyed; she placed an illusory Sita [maya-sita] outside and entered the fire. This illusory Sita saw the illusory deer and urged Rama to capture it for her.22
Ravana captures the illusory Sita, and Rama then pretends to grieve for Sita, pretends to fight to get her back, and lies to his brother Lakshmana, who genuinely grieves for Sita. Sita herself is never subjected to an ordeal at all; after Ravana has been killed and the false Sita brought back and accused, the illusory Sita enters the fire and vanishes forever, while the real Sita emerges and remains with Rama. Thus the text quells the uneasiness that the reader (or hearer) may well share with Rama at the thought of Sita’s living in Ravana’s house for so long: Rama never intended or needed to test Sita (since he knew she wasn’t in Ravana’s house at all) but had the shadow Sita enter the fire merely in order to bring the real Sita back from the fire, to make her visible again. The shadow Sita protects the real Sita from the trauma of life with Rama as well as with Ravana.
But Rama seems to forget what he has done; he grieves terribly for Sita and orders the shadow Sita into the fire as if she were real. The illusory Sita is part of the greater illusion that Rama, as a great god, is now in charge of; he is play-acting (through his lila, his artistic game) the whole time anyway, so why not playact his grief for Sita? Probably in order to maintain the power of the narrative, the author has Rama seem to forget about the shadow at crucial moments; only when the gods come and remind him of his divinity (as they do in the Valmiki text) does Fire (incarnate as the god Agni) return Sita to Rama, remarking, “You made this illusory Sita in order to destroy Ravana. Now he is dead, and that Sita has disappeared.”23 And whereas Sita’s desire for the deer in the Valmiki text proves that she can’t recognize a substitute deer, in this text she gets a substitute who can’t recognize the substitute deer, while Ravana can’t recognize the substitute Sita.
The Brahmavaivarta Purana develops the idea of the subjectivity of the surrogate Sita, who goes on to have a life of her own as Draupadi, of all people:
The shadow Sita asked Rama and Fire, “What shall I do?” Fire told her to go to the Pushkara shrine, and there she generated inner heat and was reborn as Draupadi. This shadow, who was in the prime of her youth, was so nervous and excited with lust when she asked Shiva for a husband that she repeated her request five times. And so she obtained five husbands, the five Pandavas.24
Fire gives the shadow Sita a sexual future as Draupadi, who, like the shadow Sita, is born of a fire;25 indeed it may have been the shared theme of birth from fire that attracted Draupadi from her own epic into Sita’s story in the other epic, as if Lady Macbeth somehow popped up as a character in King Lear.
INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE
THE BUDDHA
The Buddha avatar is mentioned in of the Mahabharata:26 “At the beginning of the Kali Age, Vishnu will become the Buddha, son of Shuddhodana, and he will preach in the Magadha dialect. All men will become bald, like him, and wear the ocher robe, and priests will cease to offer oblations or recite the Veda.”27 The precise historical detail of preaching in Magadhi, together with the reference to the name of the Buddha’s father as it appears in the Pali canon (and in later lists of historical Hindu dynasties28), lulls us into a false sense of historical reality—until it gets to the crucial point: “Those who sought refuge with Vishnu [as Buddha] were deluded.” The myth of Vishnu’s incarnation as the Buddha is established in full detail in the Vishnu Purana, represented on the sixth- to seventh-century Dashavatara temple at Deogarh and mentioned in a seventh-century Pallava inscription29 and an eighth-century Tamil inscription.30
The Buddha avatar was not originally, as it might seem at first glance and is often advertised as being, a genuine attempt to assimilate the teachings of the Buddha into Hinduism (though this was certainly done in many other ways). On the contrary, although Vishnu as Buddha expresses the anti-Vedic sentiments that Hindus (rightly) attribute to Buddhists, Jainas, Materialists, and other heretics, he does this in order to destroy the antigods by teaching them an evil doctrine, Buddhism, on the second alliance principle that the gods cannot destroy a virtuous person unless they first corrupt him:
VISHNU AS THE BUDDHA CORRUPTS THE ANTIGODS
The antigods conquered the gods in battle, and the gods went to ask Vishnu for help, saying, “The antigods have stolen our portions of the sacrifices, but they take pleasure in the duties of their own class and they follow the path of the Vedas and are full of inner heat. Therefore we cannot kill them. Please find a way for us to kill them.” Then Vishnu emitted from his body a deluding form of his magic power of illusion and said, “This magic deluder will bewitch all the antigods so that they will be excluded from the path of the Vedas and therefore susceptible to slaughter.” The gods went back home, and the magic deluder went to the great antigods.
Naked, bald, carrying a bunch of peacock feathers, the magic deluder taught the antigods what he called “the dharma that is the open door to moksha.” He said: “This would be dharma, but it would not be dharma. This would give moksha, but it would not give moksha.” And so on and so forth. Then he put on red robes and spoke to other antigods, saying, “If you wish for heaven or for nirvana, you must stop these evil rites such as killing animals. If an animal slaughtered in the sacrifice is thus promised entry into heaven, why doesn’t the sacrificer kill his own father? If the oblation to the ancestors that is eaten by one man satisfies another, then people traveling abroad need not take the trouble to carry food.” He caused them all to abandon the dharma of the three Vedas, to be free thinkers, and they became his disciples and persuaded others. The armor of their sva-dharma had formerly protected them, but now it was destroyed, and so were they. The gods attacked them and killed them.31
The antigods are destroyed because they abandon their antigod sva-dharma in order to join the new religious movement. The great deluder, whose defense of nonviolence (ahim
sa) is here regarded as part of the great lie, is both a Jaina (with peacock feathers) and a Buddhist (in ocher robes); sometimes he is said to be “the Buddha, the son of the Jina.”32 His argument about one man’s eating for another is a standard Hindu satire on the heresy of Materialist satire on the Hindu rite of feeding the dead ancestors (shraddha); the same argument is used against the Vedas in the Tamil Nilakeci (tenth or eleventh century), and the remark about the sacrificer’s killing his own father correctly quotes a real argument in a Buddhist Jataka text.33 Another version of the myth says that Vishnu founded the Materialist and similar sects “for the seeking of liberation through eating flesh, drinking wine, and so forth,”34 a policy that seems more Tantric than Materialist.
But the conversion of humankind to Buddhism (or Jainism, or Materialism, or Tantrism, or any other heresy) is merely an unfortunate side effect of Vishnu’s attack on the antigods, a kind of theological fallout; and the fact that the doctrine is directed against the antigods indicates the degree of anti-Buddhist sentiment that motivated the author of this myth. It is the demonization of Buddhism (as well as the Buddhification of demons). As an unfortunate bit of collateral damage from the wars in heaven, the earth is left with human Buddhists when the gods have succeeded in turning the antigods into Buddhists, like the eucalyptus trees or cane toads that people introduced into new continents in order to destroy something else, not realizing that they would then be stuck with too many eucalyptus trees and cane toads. Similarly, a fierce Hindu goddess (sometimes named Kali) is from time to time created to kill antigods, and she does, but then sometimes she begins to kill the people who created her.35 There is also a Sanskrit saying: “Like the king’s men” (raja-purusha-nyaya), referring to the fact that when you call in the soldiers to get rid of bandits who are bothering you, the bandits do go away, but then you are stuck with the often even worse depredations of the soldiers. The corruption of the Buddhists/ antigods is stated in terms of orthopraxy (people are made to stop sacrificing), but there is also a touch of orthodoxy: Teach them the wrong belief, and they will do the wrong things.
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